Rifat Tabassoom_ARCH655 Project -1

Introduction:

My project is based on the Al Bahar Tower at Abu Dhabi, UAE. This project is a successful example of climate responsive design.

In extreme high temperature of Abu Dhabi, the dynamic facades of the towers respond towards the sun exposure to protect indoor environments from heat gain and glare irritations. The facades are inspired from "Mashrabiya", an architectural element, which is typically used in traditional Islamic architecture to provide shading and privacy to indoor spaces with latticework over windows and terraces.

Project Workflow:

In my project, I created responsive facade mechanism with dynamic shading device, similar as Al Bahar Tower.

The Grasshopper scripting was divided in several steps as following:

Creation of the form and floors of the tower.
Creation of diagrid structure around the tower.
Selection of parts of the facade for dynamic shading device.
Paneling over the selected parts of the facades and generation of modules from the panels.
Creation of a Sunpath.
Connecting the modules with the Sunpath for dynamic movements.

Step 1:

The shape of the tower was created with Ellipse component, where the x and y direction radiuses were determined with ReMap component. The component Range was used to decide the tower height and floor number distribution as well as the parabolic shape of the ellipse curves. The ellipse curves were converted to surfaces and simply extruded to create the floors. Finally, the Loft tool was used for the outer wall of the tower.

Step 2:

The loft surface was offset to accommodate the diagrid structure in between the exterior wall and the shading device. LunchBox plugin was used at this step. The Triangular Panel B component of LunchBox created the structure around the towers and the Pipe tool provided the appearance of Diagrid structure.

Step 3:

The Sub Carve component divided each floor curve within a given domain. Then lofting of these curves created a facade surface which was offset to a provide the selective area for installing the dynamic shading device.

Step 4:

The Triangular Panel B component of LunchBox was used to create the dynamic triangular panels. With the Cull component, those triangles were trimmed out which are not equilateral.

After exploding the resultant curves, each triangular panel was consisted of three separated lines. With the Extrude component, those three lines created small triangular surfaces within the triangle with its centroid.

The edges of the corners were filleted for better appearance, and the Boundary Surfaces component created three surfaces for each panel from the filleted boundary edge curves.

Step 5:

With simple components like Arc, Ln, Sphere and Rotate Axis, the sun and its path were determined. The Evaluate Curve controlled the movement of the sun sphere within the arc.

Step 6:

The Surface Closest Points (Srf CP) and Evaluate Surface (EvalSrf) components were used in this step. The Srf CP component provided the Closest Point (CP) of each centroid of each triangle and their UV coordinates regarding the surface. The EvalSrf provided the normal of the CPs. Lines were determined between each CP and the centroid of the sun sphere.

The angle between these lines and the Normal of the CPs were found with the Angle component. The ReMap component converted the numerical values of the resultant angles to a given numerical domain proportionately, to have a more visually perceivable transformation of the dynamic modules.

Finally, the remapped values, boundary surfaces and the surface axis were fed to the Rotate Axis component to obtain the desired result of dynamic facade movement.

Project Challenges:

The original towers have triangular modules, where each module has six surfaces. I initially tried to create the original modules.

But the six surfaces provided six different centroids, which made the process of connecting with Sunpath highly complicated. Therefore, I simplified the modules where each module has three surfaces and one centroid. Finally, the simplification of modules worked better for the desired result.

Initially, I created some AI (PromeAI) generated pictures to visualize the facade with different modular configurations. But later, a simpler solution was utilized for my model.